Indigenous presence in the popular media is usually a cue to stories
of crime, abuse, poverty, loss, fluff and feathers pride, or
government sponsored success. And Aboriginal self-representations,
when they don’t mirror mainstream narratives, are often
self-reflexive tortured recitations on: ‘what does it mean to be
Native in contemporary times?’ and ‘how will we ever get over the
damage?’ Meta-discourse is instructive but not very inspiring. So, I
took a small pleasure in seeing two beautiful, confident Aboriginal
women talking with each other in Dana Claxton’s new online video,
“The Patient Storm.”1

While mainstream representations of Aboriginal people grow with our
population, Aboriginal knowledge has not received proportional air
time. There is talk in these circles about Aboriginal knowledge—a
lot of preteritive gesturing toward and around—but the general
public is rarely served more than a glimpse of the content.
Resistance to engage may be because this knowledge is not just
information; this knowledge is embedded in committed practices and
requires more than reading and thinking. Engagement may also be
difficult because the traditional Aboriginal world view contradicts
the currently dominant one. It is metaphysical, deeply ecological
and communitarian.

Elders at pipe ceremonies have told us
many times that aboriginally generated knowledge is not just for
First Nations people, but should be shared with everyone. Real
knowledge transcends the particular, the nation, even history.
However, because Aboriginal ways of knowing are experiential, bound
up with communities and rituals, only those willing to repeatedly
pass the social and conceptual barriers between peoples have access.
Art works can serve as this threshold. They can be non-threatening
portals between world views.

The initial gentle pleasure I have with Dana Claxton’s “The Patient
Storm” comes simply from seeing Aboriginal people not ruminating on
colonialism or contemporary aboriginality. They just get on with
Being (post-colonial, contemporary Aboriginals). This is not as easy
as it sounds. We are colonized by an imaginary that has us read
Aboriginal bodies into specific landscapes and stories.2
However, the work of decolonization need not only be about
deconstructing power and reminding us who we were, it is about
performing who we are. Perhaps we are ready to trade tropes and
exchange irony for allegory.

Dana Claxton’s “The Patient Storm” is an allegory of the competing
impulses in human beings and societies: conservancy and change.
Through the figures of Storm and Lightning, Claxton’s legend
suggests a system—inspired by Lakota teachings and practices (the
Sundance)3—in which these seeming opposites become
complementary. Tradition, on one side, and the desire for action and
novelty, on the other, are usually represented as binaries and often
as a generational divide. “The Patient Storm” mimics this
convention, only to melt the distinctions and show that traditional
ways and modern society are not incompatible.

Such lofty ambitions require an elevated site and grand characters.
In order to show her women as themselves and not as colonial
subjects, and to have us see the knowledge they figure as exceeding
specific cultures, Claxton sets them in a space apart. They are demi-goddesses
suspended above the world, beyond stereotype and historicity in a
timeless continuity. However, they are not detached. Storm and
Lightning only achieve their full being when they descend and meet
the land and join its people in the Sundance.

The scene couldn’t be simpler. The set
consists only of a white La Chaise chair.4 The
background is a changing projection of clouds: in post production,
Claxton keyed in images of clouds from mid-day to sunset, from
accumulation to forming storm. In the middle are images of stars and
celestial spirals. The characters are two women who personify
natural forces. Claxton describes the older woman, Storm, as “an
elegant, knowledgeable patient woman;”5 and
Lightning as “a trickster type, crazysexycool girlish woman.” Their
brown outfits suggest a timeless, earthy style; but the cuts reflect
different generations and temperaments: Storm wears a smart,
knee-length business dress; Lightning is dressed in more casual
culottes, a T-shirt and hoodie. What links them, besides the brown
cloth, are wrist and ankle bands, which Claxton explains, “are worn
by Sundancers, along with a crown around the head. They are
[traditionally] made from sacred red cloth and sage....” The
costumes signal the traditional and enduring alongside the
contemporary and fashionable. They are differences, but not
opposites. This theme is echoed in the sound track which features a
gently throbbing synthesized music accompanied by what sounds like a
traditional rattle.

The plot is just as lean. Storm and Lightning prepare to descend to
the earth but are held up by late members of their party. The scene
opens with Storm (Samaya Jardey), a woman in her late thirties
reclining on a large, cloud-like chair. Her head is tilted back; her
long dark hair drapes down. The camera jumps back to a mid-shot
revealing Lightning (Marie Prince),6 who is in her
early twenties. They talk. Storm mostly stays seated; Lightning
twirls an orbit around her. After seven minutes and 48 seconds, it’s
over. Not much happens, but a whole cosmos emerges.

While we only see Storm and Lightning, at least five other
individuals or groups are mentioned. Storm oscillates between
lounging languor and straight-spine alertness. She moves slowly and
gracefully with fluid and confident gestures. She is stable,
dignified, calm. Lightening describes her as sometimes “blue” and
complains that she is slow to get going, but acknowledges that once
in motion, “the whirl, the twirl brings life to you.”

Lightening is energetic. She sits only once. While her initial
movements are relaxed, as the scene progresses she becomes more
animated, almost dancing. She describes herself as “a grrrrrrl,” and
as “Exquisite Lady L, keeper of bolt—the rolling zig, zig, zag.” Her
rhythmic speech is often poetic and strange. Storm finds her
impatient and her hip hopish language hard to follow. Storm often
makes faces and ignores Lightning when she is particularly obscure.

“Rattling Wings,” “the Lightning People,” and “the prince,” are the
only other beings given proper names. Lightning is one of the
Lightening People, though, as “keeper of the bolt,” she may have an
elevated status. Because Storm is waiting for “the others,” and
regularly restrains and corrects Lightning, we can infer that she is
in charge, perhaps even personifies the whole system. “The prince,
the tide,” is more of an allusion than a character, and even then,
he is a confused reference. When Lightning mentions him, Storm is
puzzled; suggesting that either she doesn’t know him, or doesn’t
understand the whole sentence.

Lightning’s energy is sensual. Her speech is full of rhythm and
rhyme: “Stormy Storm, let’s twirl the swirl and swirl the twirl, zig
the zag and zag the zig.” Her words flow and jump as her body glides
in near dance. She often seems silly; but just as often, wise. Her
reference to the prince might be a silly moment. Storm seems to
treat it that way. But Storm is clearly repressive and side-steps
Lightning’s many sexual innuendos. “Follow the fellow, the
prince—the tide. Become wet, become untied.” The building rhythm and
force of the tide, here figured as masculine, wetness, and the play
on tide and untied seems an obvious string of sexual metaphors. But
Storm isn’t biting. The building energy, the anticipation,
frustration, and concluding off-screen release is the elemental
force that drives the story’s action.

Lightning speculates that “everyone else,” or “the others,” meaning
Rattling Wings and the Lightning People, may be late because they
are “caught up in the valley, the valley of lovvvvvvvvvvvve.” Some
sort of polymorphous sexuality seems to be roiling in this snug
metaphor: “he and me, or him and you, her and he, or she and she, or
him and he, or they and they, which ever way….” Storm looks
disturbed and changes the subject. Is she puzzled that these
possibilities exist, or that the Storm knows about them? Whatever
the case, she has other things on her mind and wants other things on
Lightning’s mind. At the moment, the Lightning People are running
hot while Storm blows cool.

“The Patient Storm” is not the retelling of a traditional story; it
is a creative, contemporary allegory. Apart from the weather, what
do these figures represent? Storm is a slow moving but dynamic
force; not an individual storm but the force behind individual
phenomena. Similarly, Lightening is not an instance of lightning,
she is “keeper of the bolts,” an inexhaustible archetypal energy
behind every specific occurrence of lightning. Storm has two
aspects: Storm, the storm potential, the burgeoning energy that she
tries to conserve, knowing full well that it must eventually irrupt;
and Stormy, her complementary, violent and generative aspect. We
only see Storm in the video. Stormy only manifests when Storm leaves
the scene at the end of the video. She explains that Stormy is her
“fundamental nature,” and that she is impelled by energies beyond
herself to reveal her irrepressible force: “I have an obligation to
appear and present my…my fundamental nature. Everybody must.” This
is not an embarrassment, but an acknowledgement of the fundamental
rhythm of the universe.

Storm is driven by several forces. As Storm, she is conservative, a
leader and regulator, keeper of protocol. She follows the rules and
obligations that precede her. These “civil” principles are
complemented by an equal force, the Stormy aspect, characterized by
whirling and twirling, by dance and pleasure. They conceivably have
the same energy—but the static state requires less of it so endures
longer; the active state dispels its energy more quickly and
subsides sooner. When Lightning describes their transformed
character once they present their other aspect, she uses the word
“turbulence,” which Storm violently rejects in her only burst of
anger: “Turbulence! Is that what you call us? No darling, not
turbulence…we are the glamorous clamour overhead.” The storm/dance
is not a disruption, but a beautiful and joyous aspect of a
continuum.

Storm is calm and patient before the dance. She is
conservative—literally, holding back, cautious, waiting for the
right moment. However, when that moment comes, she lets loose,
literally loses herself, becomes Stormy. Storm is the figure of
tradition. Traditional peoples have a conservative aspect, the
teachings and rituals that hold them together. At the same time,
traditional societies also set aside a time and place for ecstasy,
for rituals, dances, visions, fasts and feasts that attract and
release spiritual and physical energy.

Lightning is an apprentice to this duality. While she is drawn to
impulsive youthful action, she allows herself to be checked by the
older being. She is positioned between the revellers in the valley—a
group and activities she seems to know all about and may even have
just come from—and the more adult Storm. She signals her willingness
to pass from youth to adulthood by being the first of her group to
take her place alongside Storm. Symbolically, she even slips into
Storm’s chair/throne for a moment, as if to try it out. As the
elder, Storm is often irritated with Lightning’s impatience and
imperfect understanding, but does appreciate her timely arrival and
playful, revitalizing energy.

Against her foil, Lightning, Storm is less energetic and more of a
grown up. And yet, in her shifting from proper posture sitting to
draping herself over the chair, she displays sensual possibilities.
Her movements hint that she loves to dance, but that there is a
proper time for everything. Lightning’s body is less regulated. She
tries to contain her energy, but it is constantly spilling into
dance. She tries to control her language, but it is continuously
falling into poetry.

The last figures are “the people,” the humans upon which the storm
will be visited. In her first speech, Storm says: “If we don’t
appear—something is wrong. The Cosmos gone crazy—the people will
say.” She is not a free agent; she is regulated by the force of
tradition and unconscious necessity of her nature. The Cosmos is
both how things are but also what things mean. Without these
recurring events, both natural and social (the storm and the dance)
“something is wrong.”

The most ambiguous term in the video is “the others.” Sometimes it
means the late (possibly) orgiastic Lightning and Wind folks; other
times it means “the people.” The “others,” in the sense of “the
people,” is subdivided into two groups: those mortals who
participate in the dance/storm and those who resist. Also, according
to Claxton, “the others” are “those who don’t believe and those who
are anti Indian in general.” But “the others have been opposed to us
for so long” also include “those Indians who are so Christianized
that they fear their own traditional spiritual practices.” Lightning
explains: “sacred little scaredy cats. Their knowledge did not fare
well to wisdom just. Imagine that. Their opposite stance makes them
tall …even for little little scared fur balls. BUT..ah!!! ..not tall
enough to see… certainty. Perhaps they are blind….eyes gone missing,
eyes shut, shut!” In this cosmology, ideally, everyone, human and
nature and divine will be swept up in the dance, “this moment of
connectivity,” where all “fundamental natures” are expressed and are
one without division. This is the ecstatic experience; “the
glamorous clamour”!

Storm and Lightning are given full, complementary natures: physical
and metaphysical; responsible, yet sensual; traditional and
ecstatic. The oppositional others have knowledge but not wisdom.
Lightning further proposes that their status derives from negation.
It seems what is rejected may be ecstatic pleasure, losing oneself
in a group ritual, in metaphysical belief. While the others’
materialism might raise them in one aspect, it makes them not quite
tall enough to see into this richer realm. Lightning sees the denial
of spirituality as either a tragic or a wilful blindness.

Storm and Lightning participate in another sort of knowledge
(Aboriginal ways of knowing) that permits you to join the ecstatic
moment, dissolve into the dance. Storm says, “Those who know will
join us and the others are going to have to wait until they are
ready.” Lightning repeats, “Join us, those who know, start getting
ready….until the others are ready, they will have to wait.” This
knowledge may be as simple as accepting metaphysical possibilities
and being open to community. The lack of this knowledge of how
things are is figured as ignorance. Storm and Lightning face the
camera and invite us to the dance, but they do not coerce. This is
not an evangelical faith looking to win converts. Infidels are not
killed; they are recognised as afraid, pitied and left to
themselves. The others must simply “wait until they are ready” (to
end their otherness).

The video concludes with Lightning saying, “…we dance across the
sky—without defeat.” Despite the opposition and disbelieving others,
they and all who believe and participate, and live with their
dualities and in the connectedness of all things, will persist.

This construction of identity through the denial of the metaphysical
and its social expressions, Lightning suggests, is based in fear. It
could be that Claxton is characterizing this opposition as male
(“fur balls!”), or at least as masculine. But that is not
necessarily the case. When I asked her about it, she didn’t think
so. She explained that the scaredy cats refer to people who are
afraid of Aboriginal cosmologies and rituals.7

Toward the end, the coming storm, which Storm leads but is also
subject to and overwhelmed by, is characterized by Lightning as “the
moment of hope, this moment of promise, this moment of love, this
moment of connectivity….” This, according to Claxton, is the
Sundance where all the elements come together:

I have been a Sundancer for a while now and the thunder and
lightning beings must attend the dance, a storm must make an
appearance. Lightning and thunder confirms and rain cleanses. So
they make their appearance, the cosmos, as they did the night before
our shoot—which doesn’t happen very often in Vancouver—a huge
lightning/thunder and rain storm that woke Marie Prince. Lightning
came into her room. Storm had an experience as well. Me, I slept
thru the entire storm...as I had come home 2 days before from
Sundancing and needed a good long rest.

With the Sundance, I maintain and enhance my own relationship with
the cosmos and the divine. It gives me strength, spiritual strength
and connectivity to that realm, as well as strengthens my family
ties both in Saskatchewan and South Dakota.

“The Patient Storm” is designed to cross boundaries and encourages
boundary crossing: between people, peoples, and from metaphysics to
spirituality.8 It is a modern legend that echoes
the past to reveal the common dance behind all appearances.

When I watch “The Patient Storm,” I sense something in the wind: a
warm, faint, sweet scent that prefigures a glamorous clamour. I feel
in the calm; an after-battle exhaustion, longing for home. But
nothing is as it was. Is it time to turn from the surging red energy
of righteousness; from the tools of struggle to those of rebuilding?
Dana Claxton offers hope and possibility.

3 “The work does specifically address
the Sundance, when Ahawsis invited me to participate,
and I read the curatorial intent, the first image I had
was of the Sundance and the storm and cloud formations
that I have seen. The Lakota teaching, "everything you
need to know is in the sky," also came to mind (from a
correspondence with Dana Claxton).

4 The La Chaise is an organically shaped
chair that invites sitting or reclining equally.
Designed by Charles and Ray Eames (1948) for a Museum of
Modern Art competition, it is inspired by "Floating
Figure", a sculpture by Gaston Lachaise.

5 All the quotations from Dana Claxton
are retrieved for email conversation I had with her in
preparing this essay.

6 “Storm is Salish from Capilano Reserve
and Marie Prince is from up north Carrier country” (Dana
Claxton).

7 “Certainly...the "others" are those
who are anti-Indian and the furballs are scardee
cats…both male and female...perhaps on a subtextual
level more male…” (Dana Claxton).

8 “Claxton has described her two new
works as an attempt to construct a ‘religious art
approach,’ one that ‘hybridizes a cultural process of
contemporary art-making and traditional knowledge by
creating a site where two seemingly different ways of
knowing or being interface.”
Dana Claxton’s “Artist statement,” ArtSpeak Gallery. May
2000, cited in Monika Kin Gagnon, “Worldviews in
Collision: Dana Claxton’s Video Installations,”
Transference, Tradition, Technology: Native New Media
Exploring Visual and Digital Culture. Walter Phillips
Gallery Editions, Melanie Townsend, Dana Claxton, Steve
Loft eds. 2005. p. 70.

David Garneau is Associate Professor of Visual
Arts at the University of Regina. He has a BFA in
Painting and Drawing, and an MA in American Literature,
both from the University of Calgary. David was born and
raised in Edmonton, lived in Calgary for twenty years,
and has been living in Regina since 1999.

David Garneau’s practice includes painting, drawing,
curation, and critical writing. His solo exhibition,
“Cowboys and Indians (and Métis?)” is currently touring
Canada. Garneau’s work often engages issues of nature,
perception, history, masculinities, and the negotiation
of White, Aboriginal and Métis identities. He has
curated two large group exhibitions in Calgary, “The End
of the World (as we know it)” and “Picture Windows: New
Abstraction,” and four in Regina, “Transcendent
Squares,” “Sophisticated Folk,” and “Contested
Histories” for the Art Gallery of Regina, and “Making it
Like a Man,” for the Mackenzie Art Gallery. He is
currently exploring the Carlton Trail as a landscape and
historical subject, and road-kill as a landscape and
still-life subject.

David Garneau is Associate Professor and Head of Visual
Arts at the University of Regina. He has a BFA in
Painting and Drawing and an MA in American Literature,
both from the University of Calgary. David was born and
raised in Alberta and has been living in Regina since
1999.

David Garneau’s practice includes painting, drawing and
critical writing about the visual arts. Solo exhibitions
include: “Sex, Violence and the Death of Heroes,”
“Peripheral Pictures” and “Cowboys and Indians (and
Métis?). His work often engages issues of nature,
perception, masculinities, and the negotiation of White,
Aboriginal and Métis identities. Garneau recently
curated two large group exhibitions in Calgary, “The End
of the World (as we know it)” and “Picture Windows: New
Abstraction,” and two in Regina, “Transcendent Squares”
(Rosemont Art Gallery) and “Making it Like a Man,” a
national exhibition and conference for the Mackenzie Art
Gallery. He is currently exploring road kill as a still
life subject and is curating two exhibitions for 2005 at
the Rosemont Art Gallery: “Sophisticated Folk” and
“Contested Histories,” produced by the Sâkêwêwak
Artists' Collective.

David has been writing about art for seventeen years. In
1989, with Mary Beth Laviolette and Paula Gustafson, he
co-founded and co-edited Artichoke magazine. He was
western editor for C magazine (1995-1999), and was
co-founder and editor of Cameo, an arts, music and
fashion magazine (1995-7). He has written catalogue
essays on such artists as: Peter von Tiesenhausen,
Michael Campbell, Carroll Moppet, Greg Payce, Catherine
Burgess, Martha Townsend, Wyn Gelyense, Dick Averns, and
Walter May. And has written reviews for local papers in
Calgary, and national art magazines including: C, Fuse,
Vanguard, BorderCrossings, Vie des Arts, Canadian Art,
Ceramics: Art and Perception, Parrallelogramme…. David
has given his workshop, 1000 words, Exactly: Writing
About the Visual Arts for Publication, in Calgary,
Saskatoon, Regina, Fort MacMurray, Windsor, London, and
Red Deer.